Excerpts from Spook

EXCERPT from intro

"My mother worked hard to instill faith in me. She sent me to
catechism classes. She bought me nun paper dolls, as though the meager
fun of swapping a Carmelite wimple for a Benedictine chest bib might
inspire a taste for devotion. Most memorably, she read the Bible to
me. Every night at bedtime, she'd plow through a chapter or two,
handing over the book at appropriate moments to show me the color
reproductions of parables and miracles: The crumbling walls of
Jericho. Jesus walking atop stormy seas with palms upturned. The
raising of Lazarus--depicted in my mother's Bible as a sort of Boris
Karloff knock-off, wrapped in mummy's rags and rising stiffly from the
waist. I could not believe these things had happened, because another
god, the god who wore lab glasses and knew how to use a slide rule,
wanted to know how, scientifically speaking, these things could be
possible. Faith did not take, because Science kept putting it on the
spot. Did the horns make the walls fall down, or did there happen to
be an earthquake while the priests were trumpeting? Was it possible
Jesus was making use of an offshore atoll, the tops of which
frequently lie just inches below the water's surface? Was Lazarus a
simple case of premature entombment? I wasn't saying these things
didn't happen. I was just saying I'd feel better with some proof. . .
."

From the chapter The Large Claims of the Medium: Reaching out to the
dead in a University of Arizona lab

Allison DuBois is one of four mediums taking part in a research
project called the Asking Questions Study. I love this study, because
it addresses one of my main beefs with medium-brokered encounters with
the dead. Dead people never seem to address the obvious--the things
you'd think they'd be bursting to talk about, and the things all of us
not-yet-dead are madly curious about. Such as: Hey, where are you now?
What do you do all day? What's it feel like being dead? Can you see
me? Even when I'm on the toilet? Would you cut that out? If the dead
come through at all, they come through in cryptic little impressions:
a stout woman with grey hair, a small black dog, the date May 23. It's
a maddening way to communicate. Schwartz and his mediums would reply
that that's the best the dead can manage, that they can't speak
sentences into the medium's head. Impressions come through, and that's
all.

Julie Beischel, the researcher behind the Asking Questions Study,
wondered whether perhaps it was the case that the dead never give this
kind of information because no one ever bothered to ask them. She
assembled a list of thirty-two questions about the afterlife, which
are being posed to two discarnates, via four mediums. (Each medium
takes a turn with each of the two dead folks.) Beischel hasn't
analyzed the data at this point, but she gave me printouts of the
answers she has collected. With both discarnates, the answers to a
given question usually differed with each different medium. "Do you
eat?" for example, garnered an even split of yesses and nos. I asked
Beischel how she interpreted this. She said, very straightforwardly,
as is her manner: "My interpretation is that the mediums are just
guessing, or the answer is biased by the medium's own ideas of what
the afterlife is like, or the questions don't have enough emotional
interest for the discarnate to give a strong answer." Which more or
less covers all the bases. In case the answers are in fact coming from
the Beyond, I've culled some highlights for you, from various mediums.

We'll start with the good news:
Q: What do you do every day?
A: She's showing herself at the table eating.
Q: What type of "body" do you have?
A: She says fat people are thin here...
Q: How is the weather?
A: It's Florida without the humidity.
And now, some less good news:
Q: Is there music?
A: Yes. She whips out a xylophone and goes, bum, bum, bum bum bum. And I also get The Carpenters.
Q: Are there angels?
A: Yeah, ... but they've got their own clique going. They've got their own little deal going on.
Q: Do you engage in sexual behavior?
A: I don't know if like she can and she chooses not to or what the deal is, but it's like, no, not really.
And a point of interest for aspiring writers ...
He's showing me writing. .. [Experimenter: He's writing a book?] I don't know. I mean, understanding the fact that there are no, you know, physical constraints, so what the hell, why not, you know? Get your story placed somewhere. I don't know where the hell it would be placed, but somewhere...

To the formal study data, I feel I must add one last statement about
the afterlife, passed along to me by Allison DuBois, who received it
from an unnamed discarnate during a private sitting: 'I can wear
pleated pants now.'"

From the chapter You Again: A Visit to the Reincarnation Nation

"The traffic jam has dissolved, leaving our driver free to proceed in
the manner he enjoys. This entails driving as fast as possible until
the rear end of the car in front is practically in his mouth, then
laying on the horn until the car pulls into the other lane. If the
other car won't move over, he veers into the path of oncoming traffic
- for sheer drama, an approaching semi truck is best - and then back,
at the last possible instant. Livestock and crater-sized potholes
materialize out of nowhere, prompting sudden James-Bond style
swervings and brakings. It's like living inside a video game.
"Why doesn't he just get into the fast lane and stay there!?"

"There isn't a fast lane, as such," says Dr. Rawat. He gazes calmly
out his window, as goats and a billboard for RELAXO footwear flash
past. "The lanes are both the same. Whoever is slower, pulls over."
His speaks in a neutral, narrative tone, as though describing a safe
and civilized code of the road. Aggressive honking and light-flashing
is considered good manners: You're simply alerting the driver ahead of
your presence. (Rear view mirrors are apparently for checking your
hairdo. Likewise, the driver side mirror currently registers a clear
and unobstructed view of the dashboard.) Exhortations to BLOW HORN
PLEASE and USE DIPPER are painted on the backs of most trucks, so that
even the most laid-back driver goes along honking and flashing his
lights like his team has just won the World Cup. I am finding it hard
to relaxo.

In India, everywhere you look, someone is calmly comporting themselves
in a manner that we in the States would consider a terrible risk, a
beseeching of death with signal flares and megaphone. Women in saris
perch sidesaddle, unhelmeted, on the backs of freeway-fast Vespas.
Bicyclists weave through clots of city traffic, breathing leaded
diesel fumes. Passengers sit atop truck cabs and hang off the sides
like those acrobat troupes that pile onto a single bicycle. Trucks
overladen with bulbous muffin-top loads threaten to topple and bury
nearby motorists under illegal tonnages of cauliflower and potatoes.
(Accident Prone Area, the signs say, as though the area itself were
somehow responsible for the carnage.) People don't seem to approach
life with the same terrified, risk-aversive tenacity that we do. I'm
beginning to understand why, religious doctrine aside, the concept of
reincarnation might be so popular here. Rural India seems like a place
where life is taken away too easily -- accidents, childhood diseases,
poverty, pollution, murder. If you'll be back for another go, why get
too worked up about the leaving?

A bus blasts its horn and bullies us onto the shoulder. "&*@##!!"
Dr. Rawat winces. "Meddy! Just don't look out that side!'"

From the chapter Can you Hear Me Now?: Telecommunicating with the dead

"The National Forest Service has a fine and terribly dark sense of
humor, or possibly they have none at all. For somebody, perhaps an
entire committee, saw fit to erect a large wooden sign near the site
where fourteen emigrants bound for California were eaten by other
emigrants bound for California when they became trapped by the savage
snows of 1846 and starved. The sign reads: DONNER CAMP PICNIC GROUND.
I got here on a tour bus chartered by Dave Oester and Sharon Gill,
founders of the International Ghost Hunters Society. IGHS, one of the
world's largest (14,000 members in 78 countries) amateur paranormal
investigation groups, sponsors ghost-hunting trips to famously and
not-so-famously haunted sites. By and large, we look like any other
tour group: The shorts, the flappy-sleeved tees, the marshmallow
sneakers. We have cameras, we have camcorders. Unlike most visitors
here today, we also have tape recorders. I am facing a pine tree,
several feet from a raised wooden walkway that guides visitors through
the site. I hold my tape recorder out in front of me, as though
perhaps the tree were about to say something quotable. The other
members of my group are scattered pell-mell in the fields and
thickets, all holding out tape recorders. It's like a tornado touched
down in the middle of a press conference.

A couple and their dogs approach on the walkway. "Are you taping bird calls?"
I answer yes, for two reasons. First, because, well, literally, we
are. And because I feel silly saying, "We are wanting to tape the
spirit voices of the Donner Party."

Thousands of Americans and Europeans believe that tape recorders can
capture the voices of people whose vocal cords long ago decomposed.
They refer to these utterances as EVP: electronic voice phenomena. You
can't hear the voices while you're recording; they show up
mysteriously when the tape is replayed. If you do a web search on the
initials EVP, you'll find dozens of sites with hundreds of audio files
of these recordings. Though some sound like clearly articulated words
or whispers, many are garbled and echoey and mechanical-sounding. It
is hard to imagine them coming from dead souls without significantly
altering one's image of the hereafter. Heaven is supposed to have
clouds and bolts of white cloth and other excellent sound-absorbing
materials. The heaven of these voices sounds like an airship hanger.
They're very odd."

From the chapter How to Weigh A Soul: What happens when a man (or a
mouse, or a leech) dies on a scale

Lewis E. Hollander, Jr., is a sheep rancher in Bend, Oregon. Sometime
in 2000, Hollander became the second man in history to set up a
soul-weighing operation in his barn. He rigged a seven-by-three-foot
platform to a Toledo model 8132 electronic digital indicator, a
quartet of load cells, and a computer. His subjects were eight sheep,
three lambs, and a goat, all of which were sedated and then
euthanized, and all of which, he assures us, were headed that
direction anyway. The animals were wrapped in plastic to, as he put
it, contain any voiding. This was important because 1) voided material
might drip off the weighing surface, creating a spurious weight loss,
and 2) you try getting sheep urine out of your load cells.

Hollander is a kindly, soft-spoken guy, and he genuinely likes sheep.
"They're easy to deal with," he told me, "and there's a whole lot of
warm things about them." Hollander did not relish extinguishing that
warmth. "I don't know if you've ever killed anything, but it's a very
traumatic thing to do. To sit and watch this animal ..." That is why
his subject pool is limited to twelve. (He had actually contacted
local doctors about the possibility of weighing end-game hospital
patients, but ethical issues proved insurmountable.)

Here is the odd thing. All the sheep Hollander tested showed a
temporary weight gain at death--most between 30 and 200 grams. One
notable ewe put on 780 grams: nearly two pounds. The gain lasted from
one to six seconds and then it disappeared. The three lambs, did not,
however, gain any weight, and neither did the goat. I called Hollander
and asked him what he thought this meant.

"I haven't the faintest idea," he said sensibly. He acknowledged the
possibility that the weight gain was an artifact of his equipment
malfunctioning, but his instinct was that the blip was real. "If you
were there at the time, you could see the whole scenario coming
together and you could see this moment... It's weird. There was
something happening there.'"